Seiler: A far less bloody civil war

CASEY SEILER

Published 8:57 pm, Saturday, November 17, 2012

My initial reaction to last week's flurry of secession petitions was that the whole thing was an elaborate marketing scheme for Steven Spielberg's new film "Lincoln," like the Team Edward-Team Jacob fake debate ginned up for the film versions of the Goth-lite "Twilight" saga.

But while the "Twilight" films attracted teenage girls and the boys who barely understand them, secession petitions attract people who are confused by what this whole "nation" thing is all about, which makes it odd that they should use the White House's online petition generator to pitch their argument.

I was previously unaware of the "We The People" digital alleyway on the White House site, where any yahoo can launch an online campaign. The philosophy behind it is similar to that used by Gino's, the Chicago pizza mecca, where diners are allowed to scrawl their initials almost everywhere: It gives the customer an amazing sense of ownership as you're slicing up your pie.

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But in the days after President Barack Obama's election, the executive branch's petition wall has been pasted with multiple pleas asking for the slicing up of the Union. On Friday, the top petition — stomping its rival, "Recount the election!" by almost 2-to-1 — was an entreaty to allow Texas to take a hike.

"Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th-largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union," it reads, "and to do so would protect it's citizens' standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government."

Although hampered by run-on sentence structure and the improper use of "it's" for the possessive "its," the petition had earned 112,000 digital signatures. Louisiana's secession had attracted 35,000 boosters, with Florida, Georgia and Tennessee also in the top 20.

I know what you're thinking: Don't those states have something else in common related to secession, and the circumstances that led to a similar effort roughly 150 years ago?

They do — and thank you for not falling asleep in eighth-grade history.

At No. 30 on the petition list: "Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America." It was about 2,000 signatures shy of the 25,000-name threshold that would prompt a response from the White House.

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But let us not end on a note of disunion. Instead, we'll turn to a subject on which Democrats and Republicans across the nation seem to be in agreement: Mitt Romney needs to shut his trap and exit the national stage, fast.

Just weeks after apologizing for his comments in May that "47 percent" of the nation would never vote for him because they "believe that they're entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it," Romney restated that argument Wednesday in a conference call with disappointed donors.

The candidate blamed his loss not on the GOP's divisions or his own missteps, but on Obama's distribution of "gifts" to special-interest groups — you know: blacks, Hispanics, young people, the poor, you name it.

"Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women," Romney said — apparently ignorant of the fact that free contraceptives are big with both genders on college quads.

Republicans fairly trampled each other to be the first to denounce Romney's analysis. "I think that's absolutely wrong. ...We have got to stop dividing the American voters," said Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Top 10 would-be secession state.

By generating this kind of disdain, Romney may actually succeed in bringing his party together. As a Republican martyr, he's a distant echo of Lincoln — but a gift all the same.